Dr Carrie Griffin on Shakespeare’s Almanacs

Dr Carrie Griffin, lecturer in English, was invited to speak at the research seminar held by the University of Glasgow’s English Language and Linguistics Research Seminar on March 16th. In a presentation entitled “Shakespeare’s Almanacs” Carrie spoke about her current research into suspicion of some of the cheap material that was being printed and widely read at the close of the sixteenth century in England, an attitude that is especially evident in several of Shakespeare’s plays, in particular A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Her research shows that Shakespeare’s work identifies almanacs as problematic publications because they encourage reading without understanding, and that in his plays almanacs are frequently associated with copying, repetition and imitation, and are the subject of scornful remarks. Her work feeds into a wider project on understanding parodic references to the cheapening of knowledge by the early modern printing press in dramatic texts from the period.

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